Reading by Numbers Anthem Scholarship in the Digital Age Anthem Scholarship in the Digital Age investigates the global impact of technology and computing on knowledge and society. Tracing transformations in communication, learning and research, the ground-breaking titles in this series demonstrate the far-reaching effects of the digital revolution across disciplines, cultures and languages. Series Editors Paul Arthur – Australian National University, Australia Willard McCarty – King’s College London, UK Patrik Svensson – Umeå University, Sweden Editorial Board Edward Ayers – University of Richmond, USA Katherine Hayles – Duke University, USA Marsha Kinder – University of Southern California, USA Mark Kornbluh – University of Kentucky, USA Lewis Lancaster – University of California, Berkeley, USA Tara McPherson – University of Southern California, USA Janet Murray – Georgia Institute of Technology, USA Peter Robinson – University of Saskatchewan, Canada Geoffrey Rockwell – University of Alberta, Canada Marie-Laure Ryan – University of Colorado, Boulder, USA Paul Turnbull – University of Queensland, Australia Reading by Numbers Recalibrating the Literary Field KATHERINE BODE Anthem Press An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company www.anthempress.com This edition first published in UK and USA 2012 by ANTHEM PRESS 75-76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK and 244 Madison Ave. #116, New York, NY 10016, USA Copyright © Katherine Bode 2012 The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. Cover photograph ‘Bookshelves’ © Alexandre Duret-Lutz 2006 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bode, Katherine. Reading by numbers : recalibrating the literary field / Katherine Bode. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-85728-454-9 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Australian literature−History and criticism. 2. Publishers and publishing−Australia−History. 3. Booksellers and bookselling−Australia−History. I. Title. PR9604.6.B63 2012 820.9’994−dc23 2012013680 ISBN-13: 978 0 85728 454 9 (Hbk) ISBN-10: 0 85728 454 1 (Hbk) This title is also available as an eBook. CONTENTS Acknowledgements vii List of Tables and Figures ix Introduction A New History of the Australian Novel 1 Chapter 1 Literary Studies in the Digital Age 7 I Quantitative Method and its Critics 8 II Critical Quantification: Book History and the Digital Humanities 13 Chapter 2 Beyond the Book: Publishing in the Nineteenth Century 27 I Book Publishing: 1830s to 1850s 30 II Serial Publishing 34 III The Cycle of Serial and Book Publishing 40 IV Book Publishing: 1860s to 1880s 43 V Book Publishing: 1890s 47 Chapter 3 Nostalgia and the Novel: Looking Back, Looking Forward 57 I British Domination? 1940s to 1960s 62 II The Golden Age? 1970s to 1980s 70 III Multinational Domination? 1990s to 2000s 79 IV The End of Local Publishing? 1990s to 2000s 88 Chapter 4 Recovering Gender: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century 105 I Feminist Literary Criticism and the Nineteenth Century 107 II Serial Publishing 113 vi READING BY NUMBERS III Book Publishing: 1860s to 1880s 120 IV Gender and the 1890s 124 Chapter 5 The ‘Rise’ of the Woman Novelist: Popular and Literary Trends 131 I Male Domination? 1940s to 1960s 135 II Female Liberation? 1970s to 1980s 143 III Beyond Gender? 1990s to 2000s 153 Conclusion Literary Studies in the Digital Future 169 Notes 175 Bibliography 215 Index 237 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Some of the arguments and ideas present in this book were initially explored in journal articles published in Australian Literary Studies , Australian Feminist Studies , Cultural Studies Review and the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature , and in Resourceful Reading , a collection of essays I co-edited with Robert Dixon However, in these cases, what appears here is greatly expanded and significantly altered. Reading by Numbers also includes a revised and extended version of an article published in Book History. Much of this book was written with the support of an Australian Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Australian Research Council at the University of Sydney and the University of Tasmania. It was completed at the Digital Humanities Hub at the Australian National University. There are many people who have advised and assisted me during this project. I am grateful to the colleagues who have read, and commented on, parts of this manuscript, or earlier versions of these arguments and ideas, including Mark Davis, Robert Dixon, Ken Gelder, Julieanne Lamond, Elizabeth Morrison, Nicola Parsons, Susan Sheridan, Ryan Walter and Elizabeth Webby. I am particularly grateful to Paul Eggert and Williard McCarty, who read, and incisively responded to, the entire manuscript, and to Leigh Dale, who has always offered me invaluable guidance and advice, including in the development and drafting of this book. For their friendship and encouragement during this project, my thanks goes to Miranda Harman, Rebecca Johinke, Kate Mitchell, Tara Murphy, Kaz Ross and Nicola Parsons. Tara also provided lots of very useful advice about collecting and processing the data in AustLit . I am also grateful to Anthem Press for helping me bring this book to press. Not a word of Reading by Numbers could have been written without the dedication and careful attention to detail of hundreds of people, most of whom I do not know. I am referring to the dedicated bibliographers who have developed the AustLit database during its long history and in its many incarnations. My work has also greatly benefited from detailed discussion with, and advice from, those I do know at AustLit , especially Carol Hetherington and Roger Osborne. I write these acknowledgements at a time when the future of AustLit appears uncertain. It will be an enormous loss for Australian literary studies, and for current and future research in book history and digital humanities, if this database closes or is no longer maintained to its current level. I hope that, in demonstrating some of what is possible with AustLit , this book will contribute to the arguments for the ongoing funding of this resource and other digital archives. Reading by Numbers is dedicated to all who have worked at AustLit , and to the viii READING BY NUMBERS careful scholarship, and fascinating permutations of bibliography, that this resource demonstrates. Finally, I am grateful, not only for support in the writing of this book but for all sorts of things, to my wonderful family, including my brother Michael (for answering many mathematical questions), my sisters Helen and Rachael (for always having time to talk and always encouraging me) and my parents (for everything – including proof reading). Very special thanks has to go to Ben Williams, for his patience during the long time it took to write this book, and especially for listening to me talk, at length, about quantitative methods and trends in literary history, while really wanting to talk about the latest books we’d both read. LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES Tables Table 1 Top ten book publishers of Australian novels, 1830 to 1859 30 Table 2 Top ten periodical publishers of Australian novels, 1860 to 1889 36 Table 3 Top ten book publishers of Australian novels, 1860 to 1889 44 Table 4 Top ten book publishers of Australian novels, 1890 to 1899 49 Table 5 Top ten publishers of Australian novels, 1945 to 1969 64 Table 6 Top ten publishers of Australian novels, 1970s and 1980s 74 Table 7 Top ten publishers of Australian novels, 1990s and 2000s 82 Figures Figure 1 Place of first book publication of Australian novels, percentages, 1830 to 1899 (by decade) 29 Figure 2 Form of publication of Australian novels, percentages, 1830 to 1899 (by decade and date of first publication) 29 Figure 3 Number of serialised Australian novels, published in Australia and total, 1860 to 1899 (two-yearly totals) 38 Figure 4 Australian novels by category of publisher, percentages, 1945 to 2009 (five-yearly averages) 59 Figure 5 Number of Australian novels, overall and by Australian, British and multinational publishers, 1945 to 2009 (five-yearly totals) 60 Figure 6 Australian novels by category of publisher, percentages, 1930 to 1969 (five-yearly averages) 61 Figure 7 Number of Australian novels by category of publisher, 1930 to 1969 (five-yearly totals) 65 Figure 8 Australian novels by category of publisher, percentages, 1970 to 1989 (five-yearly averages) 73 Figure 9 Australian novels (excluding local pulp fiction) by category of publisher, percentages, 1970 to 1989 (five-yearly averages) 76 x READING BY NUMBERS Figure 10 Australian novels by Australian and multinational publishers, percentages, 1950 to 1989 (five-yearly averages) 77 Figure 11 Australian genre/non-genre novels, percentages, 1970 to 2009 (two-yearly averages) 86 Figure 12 Australian genre/non-genre novels published in Australia (excluding Horwitz and Cleveland titles), percentages, 1970 to 2009 (two-yearly averages) 87 Figure 13 Australian genre novels by category of publisher, percentages, 1970 to 2009 (two-yearly averages) 88 Figure 14 Proportion of locally published Australian novels by companies categorised by the number of Australian novels published per decade, 1970 to 2009 (by decade) 90 Figure 15 Australian novels by gender of author, percentages, 1830 to 1939 (five-yearly averages) 108 Figure 16 Australian novels serialised, overall and by men and women, percentages, 1860 to 1899 (five-yearly averages) 114 Figure 17 Number of serialised Australian novels, by men and women, in Australian and British periodicals, 1860 to 1899 (five-yearly totals) 116 Figure 18 Australian novels published as books in Australia and Britain, overall and by men and women, percentages, 1880s and 1890s 126 Figure 19 Australian novels by gender of author, percentages, 1945 to 2009 (five-yearly averages) 132 Figure 20 Number of Australian novels by gender of author, 1945 to 2009 (yearly totals) 133 Figure 21 Australian novels (excluding pulp fiction) published in Australia by gender of author, percentages, 1945 to 2009 (five-yearly averages) 134 Figure 22 Men and women in the top twenty most critically discussed Australian authors, percentages, 1945 to 2006 (by decade) 134 Figure 23 Australian novels (excluding pulp fiction) by men and women, published by Australian and multinational companies (with and without Torstar), percentages, 1965 to 2009 (five-yearly averages) 149 Figure 24 Number of Australian novels (excluding pulp fiction) by men and women, published by Australian and multinational companies (with and without Torstar), 1965 to 2009 (five-yearly totals) 150 Introduction A NEW HISTORY OF THE AUSTRALIAN NOVEL Often engaging and well-written, [literary histories] are also in general derivative and conservative... New histories cannot but rely to a considerable extent on previous ones... It remains to be seen whether the possibilities offered by the web, and by electronic communications in general, will allow for a ‘flatter’, more horizontal and extensive, even more ‘democratic’ form of history production in the future. 1 In the popular imagination, archives remain dusty, hidden, forgotten places; in fact, they are increasingly likely to be digital and available online. 2 By changing the form that archives take, technology also transforms the ways in which they can be searched and the types of questions that can be asked of them. This shift affords opportunities for more extensive, data-rich and quantitative approaches to literary historical scholarship. But it does not negate – it actually increases – the potential for what we find in the archives to challenge and transform the way we understand the past. That, in a nutshell, is the premise and the aim of Reading by Numbers. By mining, modelling and analysing data in a digital archive – AustLit , a comprehensive, online bibliographical record of Australian literature 3 – I present a new history of the Australian novel: one that concentrates on the nineteenth century and the decades since the end of the Second World War, and aims precisely for the more ‘extensive’ and ‘democratic’ historiography encouraged by the epigraph. As these words imply, this is not a history of the great authors of Australian novels, nor of the canonical texts in this tradition. It is a history of the ‘routine configurations’ of this literary form, 4 and of the ‘patterns, conjunctions, connections, and absences’ 5 in that history that only emerge in aggregate: when the Australian novel is approached as a field and a system rather than a collection of individual authors and texts. This approach is possible because Australia is leading the world in the scope and comprehensiveness of its digital bibliographical archive. Analysing the extensive data in AustLit has enabled me to ask questions about trends in the authorship of Australian novels as well as their form, place of publication, circulation and the reading communities they accessed. This exploration of trends both challenges established ideas about, and provides the basis for new understandings of, the history of the Australian novel. Established arguments in Australian literary history that this book addresses and challenges include: that colonial authors were entirely – or even predominantly – reliant on British publishers; that men were the most successful authors of nineteenth-century Australian novels; that the 1970s and 1980s were a period of considerable growth in 2 READING BY NUMBERS the Australian novel field; and that contemporary Australian literature and publishing are currently in crisis due to the dominance of multinational conglomerates. In other cases, the historical trends suggested by analysis of the bibliographical data indicate new features of the Australian novel’s history. Among the many arguments in this book are new propositions regarding gender trends in the authorship of such titles; the circulation of Australian novels within Australia and beyond; and the readerships, in Australia and elsewhere, for this literary form. Two main themes pervade this new literary history. The first is transnationalism. Despite the recent ‘transnational turn’ in humanities scholarship, most literary histories – and indeed, many book histories – still analyse literature in relation to a particular national space. 6 Although the data I use in Reading by Numbers come from a national bibliographical archive, I explore the production, dissemination and reception of the Australian novel within and beyond the nation’s boundaries. For the nineteenth century I consider the relationship between the constructions of authorship, operations of publishing and formation of reading communities in Britain and the Australian colonies, as well as the movement of literature – in book and serial form – between these two places. In the contemporary period, I chart the history of the Australian novel in relation to a shift from a largely (though also generally unacknowledged) nation-based publishing industry to an explicitly globalised, or multinational, one. I demonstrate how the tension between nationalism and globalism shapes contemporary literary criticism, and explore the impact of transnational literary and political discourses on gender trends in the production and reception of Australian novels. The second overarching theme in this book is the issue – and the question – of value. As I discuss in Chapter 1, quantitative analyses are frequently criticised for neglecting this aspect of the literary field. Because such analyses rarely, if ever, attend to what might be called the aesthetic features of particular literary works, they are seen as failing to appreciate – or, in stronger terms, as ignoring and desecrating – literary value. This book does not deny that such value exists; rather, my point – and my concern – is that these constructions of value are too determining of literary history. Not only do particular (but loosely defined) value judgements about literature stand for many literary scholars as the only legitimate way of understanding that field, when translated into literary history, these decisions about what works are worthy of attention come to comprise the entirety of what we understand that history to be. The literary field contains multiple – changing, and often competing – ideas about the value of particular literary forms, and of the uses and meanings of literature. This book considers how the history of the Australian novel changes when forms not traditionally valued by literary critics are incorporated. There are many of these, but the main ones that emerge in this study are serialised fiction in the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth, pulp fiction and popular genres more broadly. A history of the Australian novel that does not simply dismiss or deny the various regimes of value circulating in literary culture not only alters our understanding of that form and its development, but exposes and challenges assumptions – particularly regarding gender, class, geography and commerce – that lie beneath the value judgements made by Australian literary scholars and historians, and that shape large- as well as author-scale studies. *** A NEW HISTORY OF THE AUSTRALIAN NOVEL 3 I have emphasised how Reading by Numbers differs from previous studies; but it also builds on the cultural materialist approach that has characterised most histories of Australian literature since at least the late 1980s. One of the most influential early books to demonstrate this approach was Ken Gelder and Paul Salzman’s The New Diversity: Australian Fiction 1970–1988 . Published in 1989, this study foregrounds the material contexts under which Australian literature was produced and consumed in that period. 7 More recently, in 2000, Elizabeth Webby’s introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature describes the commitment of that collection, and of Australian literary studies generally, to a ‘culturally materialist perspective’, which she defines as a view of literary works not as aesthetic objects produced by gifted intellectuals but as cultural artefacts inevitably influenced and constrained by the social, political and economic circumstances of their times, as well as by geographical and environmental factors. 8 Alternatively, David Carter describes contemporary Australian literary studies in terms of ‘a kind of new empiricism’ – an approach developing ‘precisely through engagement with theories of culture that point beyond literary autonomy’. 9 While empirical approaches to Australian literature in bibliography and scholarly editing have always considered this context,10 the emphasis on cultural materialism spread to the discipline more broadly through the influence of identity-based political and theoretical movements including Marxism, feminism and post-colonialism. These approaches motivated an interest in the position or construction of authors and texts, and to a lesser extent readers, in relation to historical and cultural discourses of class, gender, sexuality, race and geography. In the last decade or so, this focus on the contexts of production and consumption has taken a more specifically economic and material turn, with attention shifting to the ways in which literary works relate to and are incorporated within broader literary and commodity culture. 11 Although related to the impact of cultural studies on the discipline, this shift is increasingly attributable to the rise of the history of the book, an interdisciplinary fi eld that emphasises ‘print culture and the role of the book as material object within that culture’ 12 (the book, here, is taken to mean ‘script and print in any medium, including books, newspapers, periodicals, manuscripts and ephemera’ 13 ). Indeed, much contemporary research into the history of Australian literature – especially in respect to the nineteenth century, but increasingly in relation to the twentieth – occurs at the boundaries of literary and book history. It is at these boundaries that quantitative methods are playing a growing and prominent role in Australian literary studies. Recent quantitative work in this field, some of which I discuss in detail in this book, explores Australian literature in relation to publishing, sales, reviewing and readerships. 14 Of course, simply because they are increasingly common does not mean such approaches are accepted by everyone. Susan Lever, for instance, associates the rise of book history, ‘distant reading’, and ‘quantifying skills’ with the decline of evaluative criticism, which she claims must remain ‘the main game for a literary academic’ and the focus of Australian literary studies. 15 However, I see this incorporation of quantitative approaches not as a dramatic departure from, but as a logical next step in, the cultural materialist approach. 4 READING BY NUMBERS A central feature of cultural materialist studies has been a move beyond the canonical perspective of earlier histories of Australian literature, 16 to a broader conception of the literary fi eld. This widening perspective is foregrounded in the title of The New Diversity , which discusses a much greater range of authors and books than was the case in earlier histories. Eleven years later, Delys Bird’s chapter on contemporary fi ction in The Cambridge Companion referred to 107 authors. 17 Although not even approaching the more than 2,500 Australian authors who published novels in the years she surveys (from 1970 to 1999), this figure demonstrates the shift in Australian literary studies to trying to survey the range of what was written, published and read, rather than a selective canon of great works. 18 Quantitative research into Australian literature enables this ongoing attempt to perceive and represent literary culture in as broad and comprehensive a way as possible. Rather than detracting from evaluative criticism, my work on trends in the production and reception of Australian literature has the potential to alleviate some of the pressure for coverage by providing a context in which to discuss individual works, including those of the canon. It could, in other words, allow literary scholars to concentrate more effectively on providing detailed and nuanced readings of particular literary works, without having to abandon a sense of those works as ‘cultural artefacts’, embedded in a social, political, economic and material world. At the same time, quantitative methods – and the computational strategies that enable them – should not be accepted uncritically. Their incorporation into literary studies raises a range of theoretical, methodological and epistemological issues that need to be considered if such approaches are to make a valuable and ongoing contribution to humanities scholarship. Considering these issues is the focus of my first chapter, ‘Literary Studies in the Digital Age’. This chapter outlines the main criticisms that have been made of quantitative approaches to literary history: that they ignore the complexity of literary texts and privilege a simplistic understanding of literary culture; make false claims to absolute knowledge; and resonate, in problematic and complicit ways, with dominant institutional and political discourses. While acknowledging the importance of these criticisms, I show that these characteristics are not intrinsic to the quantitative method. Drawing on methodological discussions in book history and the digital humanities, I outline a critical approach to working with data and computers in literary history, and the humanities more broadly. This approach is one that maintains a view of the importance of empirical data and the historical understandings they can enable, while conceptualising the creation, presentation and interpretation of data as a form of representation and argument, rather than an expression of objective truth. Such an understanding enables a productive integration of – rather than a hostile stand off between – empirical analysis and humanities inquiry. The remaining four chapters deploy the theoretical and methodological framework outlined in Chapter 1 to explore the history of the Australian novel. These chapters are divided in two ways: by period and focus. In respect to period, Chapters 2 and 4 consider the nineteenth century, and Chapters 3 and 5 investigate the decades since the end of the Second World War. One chapter for each of these periods focuses on trends in publishing (Chapters 2 and 3), the other on gender trends in authorship (Chapters 4 and 5). My concern throughout is to explore how trends in the authorship, publication, distribution A NEW HISTORY OF THE AUSTRALIAN NOVEL 5 and reception of Australian novels challenge received wisdom about, and add to our understanding of, the history of that form. Recent histories of publishing and reading in Australia during the nineteenth century emphasise the dominance of British publishers and books for colonial authors and readers, in a framework that presents local publishers and authors as largely marginal to colonial literary culture. Chapter 2, ‘Beyond the Book: Publishing in the Nineteenth Century’, argues that Australian publishers – especially of periodicals – and local readers were of foundational importance to the history of the Australian novel. Although British book publishers played a major role in the colonial market, in the first half of the nineteenth century local publishers provided essentially the only avenues of publication for authors who remained in the colonies. In the second half of the century, until the 1890s, more Australian novels were first published in the colonies than were first published in Britain. The local readerships for Australian novels indicated by these publishing trends – and other data on circulation and pricing – suggest alternative modes of reading existed alongside the ‘Anglocentric reading model’ that currently dominates understandings of colonial literary culture. 19 These local readerships also provide a reason why, when seeking access to the lucrative colonial book market in the 1890s, British presses substantially increased their publication of Australian novels. The findings outlined in this chapter show that relationships between British publishers and colonial authors and readers were more interactive than the top-down exercise of power implied by histories emphasising the dominance of the imperial centre. Chapter 3, ‘Nostalgia and the Novel: Looking Back, Looking Forward’, also analyses publication data, but for Australian novels since the end of the Second World War. I use this data to complicate the widespread conception of the 1970s and 1980s as a ‘golden age’ for Australian literature and publishing. While this understanding – and the cultural or literary nationalist paradigm that underpins it – organises contemporary Australian literary history, including recent book histories, the periodisation it institutes bears little resemblance to the production and circulation of Australian novels in these decades. In particular, this nostalgic nationalist framework conceals the importance of the local publishing industry to Australian authors and readers immediately following the war, and can only perceive recent trends in publishing negatively. I highlight the continuities in publishing trends before, during and after this purported ‘golden age’, while also exploring the growth and implications of self- and subsidy-funded publishing in the 1990s and 2000s. The periodisation, industry dynamics, and relationships between authorship, publishing and reading presented in this chapter are significantly more complex, but also more interesting and challenging, than existing histories of contemporary Australian literature and publishing allow. Chapters 4 and 5 also focus, respectively, on the nineteenth century and the decades since the end of the Second World War. In exploring gender trends in the authorship of Australian novels they add another layer to the revised history already presented. Chapter 4, ‘Recovering Gender: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century’, shows that the three major forms in which colonial novels were published – local serialisation, and British and Australian book publication – manifested distinct gender trends in authorship. Women’s novels were more likely to be serialised than men’s, while men’s novels were more likely 6 READING BY NUMBERS to be published as books. At the same time, and despite the fact that men outnumbered women as authors of nineteenth-century Australian novels, more titles by women were published as books in Britain. Women authors, in other words, were overrepresented in the two areas of publication for colonial novels – as serials and as British books – that offered the greatest economic and/or cultural rewards. I argue that competing gendered constructions of the novel and authorship in Britain and the colonies profoundly shaped the transnational circulation of nineteenth-century Australian novels and that, in the cultural terms of the day, women novelists – although outnumbered by their male counterparts – were more successful. At least, this was the case until the 1890s, when book publication in Britain became common for colonial male novelists. As well as offering a new perspective on Australian literary culture in this decade, gender trends in the 1890s suggest another way in which British publishers responded to local practices and preferences to gain entry to the colonial book market. Chapter 5, ‘The “Rise” of the Woman Novelist: Popular and Literary Trends’, explores gender trends in the publication of Australian novels since the end of the Second World War. The empirical data strongly support the claim by feminist critics that, around 1970, Australian literature shifted from a predominantly male-oriented field to one where women played an increasingly prominent and important role. However, I also show that this gendered shift, while occurring in the literary and critical spheres that are the predominant focus of feminist analyses, was most pronounced in genre fiction publishing. The parallels between gender trends in popular and literary spheres emphasise the importance of gender-alert analyses for understanding Australian literary history. But they challenge the meanings that feminist literary critics have attached to this shift, specifically, the interpretation of growth in Australian women’s writing in the 1970s and 1980s as an indication of women’s political and social emancipation. I argue that political changes were influential, but that this shift was also – and primarily – a commercial trend, driven by new awareness of a female market for fiction, popular and literary. Challenging the established association of women’s writing and women’s liberation is especially important for understanding gender trends in the 1990s and 2000s. Although it has not been acknowledged, women now dominate the Australian novel field. Far from being a sign of women’s liberation, I argue that this gender trend in authorship has produced both a devaluing of this literary form, and a re-establishment of male novelists at the centre of critical discussion and acclaim. As I demonstrate through these case studies, quantitative analysis and computational methods have significant potential to offer new perspectives on existing debates in literary studies, as well as new ways of conceptualising the field, and new research questions and directions for literary scholarship in the future. Chapter 1 LITERARY STUDIES IN THE DIGITAL AGE [T]here is no method, however well adapted to a given science, that literary history can transplant and apply to its own researches. The illusion that this is possible is responsible for much poor and childish work: statistics and charts, evolution of species, and quantitative analysis are processes, methods, and hypotheses excellent in their place, but their place is not literary history. 1 In the last decade, and especially in the last four or five years, the insistence in this epigraph – that quantitative methods have no place in literary history – has been repeated many times. The fact that this particular passage comes from a book first published in 1922, and intended as a guide for graduate students, should demonstrate that both the application of such methods, and the resistance to them, are of considerably longer standing in debates about literary history than is generally acknowledged. Nonetheless, discussion of quantitative methods has almost certainly never been as heated or as widespread – or as apparent to the majority of literary scholars – as it is today. While there are a number of quantitative approaches to literature, 2 the current debate focuses on Franco Moretti’s work in literary history. As Priya Joshi says, literary scholars have for a long time ‘regarded quantitative analysis with suspicion bordering on contempt’. 3 But in the response to the publication in 2000 of Moretti’s ‘Conjectures on World Literature’, and in 2005 of his book Graphs, Maps, Trees , 4 this contempt has escalated – especially in the American humanities – to an intense stand-off. 5 The controversy surrounding Moretti’s work is, to a significant extent, specific to it. But this debate also presents important criticisms of quantitative methods that need to be engaged with if such studies are to make a productive contribution to literary history and humanities scholarship generally. This chapter considers three closely related criticisms that have been levelled at quantitative literary research (predominantly at Moretti’s ‘experiments’ in literary history): first, that such approaches reduce the inherent complexity and multiplicity of literature and language to uniform data; second, that quantitative methods make false claims to authoritative and objective knowledge; and finally, that such studies resonate, in problematic and complicit ways, with contemporary institutional discourses, especially neoliberal or economic rationalist managerial practices. I am not proposing that such criticisms are never applicable to quantitative approaches; like all research practices, these can be applied in varying ways. Nor is this chapter a defence of Moretti’s scholarship. Although his centrality to the debate makes an engagement with his arguments and methods unavoidable – and while I find his work well worth the engagement – some aspects of Moretti’s research justify some of the 8 READING BY NUMBERS criticisms that have been made. However, I will argue that reductionism, absolutism and acquiescence to neoliberalism are not intrinsic to quantitative methods. In this chapter I discuss work in book history and the digital humanities that I have found useful in developing my approach to literary historical data. Specifically, I argue that an approach based on book history’s methodological pragmatism regarding the nature and use of data, and the digital humanities’ method of modelling, offers a productive way of integrating empirical data with the paradigm of humanities knowledge as a critical, analytic and speculative process of inquiry. This approach maintains what Donna Haraway calls ‘a no-nonsense commitment to a faithful account of the “real” world’, 6 while preserving, in George Levine’s words, ‘a tentativeness that keeps all aspirations to knowledge from becoming aspirations to power as well’. 7 I Quantitative Method and its Critics As the criticisms of quantitative approaches to literature are largely directed at Moretti’s work, I will begin with a brief summary of his arguments: both against conventional approaches to literary history and for quantitative methods. For decades, Moretti has argued that a literary history based only on the texts that make up the canon offers no insight into the vast ‘mass’ of literature, and no basis for understanding the causes and processes of literary change. In 1983 he wrote that: [A]t present, our knowledge of literary history closely resembles the maps of Africa of a century and a half ago: the coastal strips are familiar but an entire continent is unknown. Dazzled by the great estuaries of mythical rivers, when it comes to pinpointing the source we still trust too often to bizarre hypotheses or even to legends. 8 More recently, Moretti has refined this critique into a specific challenge to the reliance of literary history on detailed textual analysis or ‘close reading’ as the source of historical evidence. He identifies ‘close reading’ – where the ‘representative individual’ defines the ‘whole’, or the ‘one per cent of the canon’ signifies ‘the lost 99 per cent of the archive’ – as a form of ‘topographical thinking’. 9 The main problem with this approach, and the source of what Moretti considers as irrationality, lies in the fact that the ‘rare and... exceptional’ works of the canon are by definition not representative. 10 In taking the canon as its object, literary history fails to consider the ‘banal, everyday, normal’ operations of the literary field and the wider context in which literary change occurs. 11 For Moretti, the means of overcoming this unrepresentative focus cannot be more reading. The size of the archive renders this potential solution impossible to achieve: even ‘a novel a day every day of the year would take a century or so’ to cover nineteenth- century British fiction. As well as a matter of scale, close reading gives no insight into the workings of the literary system: [A] field this large cannot be understood by stitching together separate bits of knowledge about individual cases, because it isn’t a sum of individual cases: it’s a collective system, that should be grasped as such, as a whole. 12 LITERARY STUDIES IN THE DIGITAL AGE 9 To this end, Moretti offers a paradigm of ‘distant reading’ that deliberately abstracts both the material and textual features of literary works to provide new accounts of literary history based on ‘a specific form of knowledge: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection. Shapes, relations, structures. Forms. Models.’ 13 Moretti’s work provides an important statement of the contribution quantitative methods can make to literary history: namely, their potential to represent historical trends and, in so doing, enable a form of analysis that moves beyond the handful of exceptional texts and authors that are repeatedly discussed in literary history. However, and although he is often perceived as such, 14 Moretti is not the only scholar to make these arguments: both his challenge to established practices in literary history and his rationale for quantitative analyses align closely with ideas in book history. Since the emergence of this interdisciplinary field in the 1980s, 15 book historians have – like Moretti – rejected a canonical approach to literary history and challenged that discipline’s reliance on theory, insufficiently grounded in empirical, historical evidence (what Moretti calls literary history’s basis in ‘bizarre hypotheses’ and ‘legends’). Robert Darnton, for instance, describes the canonical approach to – or ‘great-man, great-book variety’ of – literary history as an artifice, pieced together over many generations, shortened here and lengthened there, worn thin in some places, patched over in ot